The CRM Idol Finalists

The finalists have been selected.

The qualifications, presentations, demonstrations and multiple-round judging have resulted in the 2011 CRM Idol finalists—four for the Americas and three from EMEA. Now the finalists are preparing their final videos—which we'll publish here and then commence the voting. We'll ask you to vote right here on this page. The votes recorded here will be tallied with voters from other locations in order to crown the one CRM Idol for each region. Stay tuned.

About CRM Idol

CRM Idol is a unique opportunity for 60 CRM and social CRM software providers to make their pitches to the industry's most recognized influencers and advocates and connect with bloggers, analysts, venture capitalists, global integrators and alliance partners—all while garnering valuable media coverage and highly focused publicity.

Top 4 Americas CRM Finalists

Timing is everything. The day before the final four CRM Idol finalists were announced, Salesforce.com announced its newest acquisition—Assistly. Nonetheless, this pioneering publisher met the competition criteria and was judged and scored an Idol finalist before the looming acquisition announcement. Assistly delivers a web-based, multi-channel customer support application to companies with 5 to 1,000 employees. The product includes case management, knowledgebase, dynamic FAQs, community Q&A, email, chat and social channel integration on Twitter and Facebook.

Crowd Factory provides Social Marketing Automation (SMA) solutions in order to make your current B2C or e-commerce marketing campaigns more social. The company embeds its technology into medios sociales and digital channels (such as Facebook, display ads, email, landing pages and video) to drive traffic and engagement using voting systems, recommendations, promotions, discounts, comments and ratings widgets. Within the ad you can place a voting system with social share capabilities that customers can access without leaving the ad or landing page.

Get Satisfaction empowers its customers to deploy and manage online communities where participants can post questions, comments and complaints. Get Satisfaction customers can respond to posts directly, or their customers can respond to each other. Community members can rate the responses based on how helpful they are. Get Satisfaction then appends metadata to customer comments, such as Etiquetas, keywords, products, sentiment and other attributes, in order to analyze the wealth of unstructured conversation and user generated content.

This company develops a suite of call/contact/service applications, and a middleware type layer called Systems of Engagement (SE), that integrate to and complement a customer's existing call center systems (such as Siebel or Salesforce's Service Cloud). The SEs access data held in CRM systems, communities, Knowledge Management systems and other enterprise applications. This mash-up type approach can extract data in legacy systems and present it to agents in a Web 2.0 experience. The SaaS CRM application is developed with Force.com.

Top 3 Europe, Middle East and Northern Africa (EMEA) CRM Finalists

Based in the UK, BPMonline CRM finds competitive differentiation with its enhanced business process management (BPM) features. The SaaS CRM software is based on the advanced process modeling standard – BPMN – and enables non-programmers, such as business analysts, to modify the CRM system in order to fit business requirements without the need for programming. The CRM solution also caters to several industries, including advertising, banking, distribution, professional services, retail, telecommunications and value added distribution.

Also based in the UK, Workbooks.com delivers a Software as a Service CRM solution designed for small and mid-size organisations. In addition to the traditional sales, marketing and customer service CRM capabilities, Workbooks.com offers integrated order fulfillment which includes transaction processing for quotes, contracts, sale orders, purchase orders, invoices and credit memos—particularly helpful for product-centric and inventory carrying companies looking for a CRM system capable of supporting the sale and support of products or merchandise.

Making a clean sweep for the UK, the Zestia Capsule CRM system rounds out the final three CRM Idol contestants. Zestia Capsule CRM is designed for small business companies, and integrates with other popular applications such as Google Apps, FreshBooks, MailChimp and social networks to provide a complete view of the customer relationship. Capsule CRM also offers a particularly inviting user interface, one that resembles highly touted consumer applications, and delivers an enjoyable user experience to B2B CRM customers.